by Paul Merton
‘That’s strange,’ said Albert Edward.
To make sure he walked right up the street again. No, there was no doubt about it.
He stopped and looked reflectively up and down.
‘I can’t be the only man as walks along this street and wants a fag,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t wonder but what a fellow might do very well with a little shop here. Tobacco and sweets, you know.’
He gave a sudden start.
‘That’s an idea,’ he said. ‘Strange ’ow things come to you when you least expect it.’
‘You’re very silent this afternoon, Albert,’ his wife remarked.
‘I’m thinkin’,’ he said.
He considered the matter from every point of view and next day he went along the street and by good luck found a little shop to let that looked as though it would exactly suit him. Twenty-four hours later he had taken it, and when a month after that he left St Peter’s, Neville Square, for ever, Albert Edward Foreman set up in business as a tobacconist and newsagent. His wife said it was a dreadful come-down after being verger of St Peter’s, but he answered that you had to move with the times, the church wasn’t what it was, and ’enceforward he was going to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. Albert Edward did very well. He did so well that in a year or so it struck him that he might take a second shop and put a manager in. He looked for another long street that hadn’t got a tobacconist in it and when he found it, and a shop to let, took it and stocked it. This was a success too. Then it occurred to him that if he could run two he could run half a dozen, so he began walking about London, and whenever he found a long street that had no tobacconist and a shop to let he took it. In the course of ten years he had acquired no less than ten shops and he was making money hand over fist. He went round to all of them himself every Monday, collected the week’s takings, and took them to the bank.
One morning when he was there paying in a bundle of notes and a heavy bag of silver the cashier told him that the manager would like to see him. He was shown into an office and the manager shook hands with him.
‘Mr Foreman, I wanted to have a talk to you about the money you’ve got on deposit with us. D’you know exactly how much it is?’
‘Not within a pound or two, sir; but I’ve got a pretty rough idea.’
‘Apart from what you paid in this morning it’s a little over thirty thousand pounds. That’s a very large sum to have on deposit and I should have thought you’d do better to invest it.’
‘I wouldn’t want to take no risk, sir. I know it’s safe in the bank.’
‘You needn’t have the least anxiety. We’ll make you out a list of absolutely gilt-edged securities. They’ll bring you in a better rate of interest than we can possibly afford to give you.’
A troubled look settled on Mr Foreman’s distinguished face. ‘I’ve never ’ad anything to do with stocks and shares and I’d ’ave to leave it all in your ’ands,’ he said.
The manager smiled. ‘We’ll do everything. All you’ll have to do next time you come in is just to sign the transfers.’
‘I could do that all right,’ said Albert uncertainly. ‘But ’ow should I know what I was signin’?’
‘I suppose you can read,’ said the manager a trifle sharply.
Mr Foreman gave him a disarming smile.
‘Well, sir, that’s just it. I can’t. I know it sounds funny-like, but there it is, I can’t read or write, only me name, an’ I only learnt to do that when I went into business.’
The manager was so surprised that he jumped up from his chair.
‘That’s the most extraordinary thing I ever heard.’
‘You see, it’s like this, sir, I never ’ad the opportunity until it was too late and then some’ow I wouldn’t. I got obstinate-like.’
The manager stared at him as though he were a prehistoric monster.
‘And do you mean to say that you’ve built up this important business and amassed a fortune of thirty thousand pounds without being able to read or write? Good God, man, what would you be now if you had been able to?’
‘I can tell you that, sir,’ said Mr Foreman, a little smile on his still aristocratic features. ‘I’d be verger of St Peter’s, Neville Square.’
HITLER’S SECRET DAIRY
Bruce McCall
Bruce McCall (1935–) is a Canadian expatriate who began his career in a commercial art studio, switched to journalism and then advertising, and began writing and painting humorous subjects in the seventies, first with National Lampoon and ultimately for The New Yorker. He lives in New York.
JUNE 25, 1933
Telepathic vibrations have relayed the electrokinetic force of my will into the minds of others! Today, E. led me out into the dooryard and presented me with a cow! Female, classically Rubenesque, black-and-white camouflage! Tomorrow, like a cowboy, I will pat her head!
JUNE 27, 1933
E. says a Brown Swiss would match my shirt, but I remind her that the Holstein is the more German animal. Only the left-handed and others in the grip of the world riboflavin trust, which I will smash, would dare argue to the contrary!
AUGUST 16, 1933
I will not refuse Destiny’s mandate! The cow has had a cub today, the two-hundredth anniversary of Frederick the Great’s marriage to Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern! Führer, architect, artist, dairyman!
NOVEMBER 12, 1934
I confer with my milking instructor, who insists that I must have been a milkman in my previous incarnation, so quickly have I mastered the tricky Friesian Squeeze! No sign of Himmler (22:30 hrs.)! He should have finished cleaning the stalls by now.
APRIL 17, 1935
Göring again lets his straw make disgusting noises as he finishes up his milkshake. I am forced to decree that hereafter only E. and I are to be served milkshakes. E. begs me to hear her ukulele recital of highlights from “Die Walküre,” but I am in no mood for culture festivals!
AUGUST 2, 1937
Bormann brings me a Belted Galloway heifer to inspect. It steps on von Rundstedt’s nice shiny boots! Ha ha!
FEBRUARY 6, 1938
That Goebbels is a didactic little pettifogger and an advertising man! He wastes an hour of my time tonight attempting to convince me that cowboys should correctly be called horseboys. But he has his uses. Tonight he showed me a film. The Adolf Hitler Bovine Battalion has trained its entire crack herd to wag their tails in unison forty-eight times on command, in honor of my age! I insisted that Goebbels run this stirring tribute several times, once backward. E. claims that my eyes were brimming. This I will not deny!
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
Busy day. Nevertheless showed Speer my sketches of an underground dairy, which future difficulties may make advisable. He must design the largest and grandest dairy in the entire history of the human and bovine races, not omitting a Rotunda of the Germanic Bovines, large enough that the Great Pyramid of Cheops could easily fit beneath its ceiling! I shall call it “Lactia.” It will last a thousand years. Who can tell? With good management, perhaps even longer!
OCTOBER 23, 1939
My first public milking attempt is sabotaged by Ribbentrop’s coughing fit, which startles the cow, Irmtraud, who is high-strung. Hess tries making a joke of this, knowing well how I despise jokes—and jokesters who make jokes! He should clip his eyebrows. Ribbentrop is a dandified weasel who incessantly puffs on English cigarettes, and never gives me the little cards inside with pictures of ocean liners and aircraft and trains. Hess leaps to light Ribbentrop’s infernal smokes. So! The two are in cahoots after all!
OCTOBER 24, 1939
Such incidents as yesterday’s would be grist for the mills of that hack Sunday painter Churchill and other smart-aleck cads. I have ordered that my dairy interests and activities must henceforth be an official secret of the Reich. E. must tell the locals that she is Frau Schicklgruber, a lost aviatrix.
MARCH 4, 1940
The chubby hat collector Göring swears never to use a straw if he is again permitte
d to drink milkshakes. E. says his hands feel like blancmange and that he would make a poor dairyman. She says I have fine hands for milking, as the perspiration makes an ideal lubricant. I believe she is correct in this!
JUNE 30, 1940
Hess bursts in with a look of pure triumph, swiftly erased. When I demanded the Jerseys and Guernseys, I meant the animals!
AUGUST 21, 1940
Old Pétain, along with Laval, visits. The French know nothing of cows or milking. I explained to Schacht afterward that great dairy undertakings have been historically alien in all cultures with vowel-dominant languages. He was fascinated.
MARCH 12, 1941
The fatheaded scientific masterminds plead that my design for a rocket-powered milking machine is “impractical.” That is what they think, is it? Is that what they think? I think “Ha ha.”
MAY 15, 1941
Is the Aberdeen a beef cow or a milk cow? Tonight at supper (cheese, buttermilk, yogurt), Rosenberg and Funk answered yes. Bormann asked which I wanted it to be. Only Hess offered to find out. Perhaps I have misjudged him; a chowderhead, but a chowder-head with initiative!
MAY 16, 1941
The chowderhead went to Scotland!
JANUARY 21, 1942
A pair of silk milking gloves from Mussolini. Wrong size! How I wish to cuff that popinjay fibber-deluxe of a Duce with them!
SEPTEMBER 16, 1943
Doenitz claimed today that cottage cheese is not made from dairy products. Raeder disagreed violently. I let them argue it out.
NOVEMBER 8, 1944
E. insists the cows are saying “moo,” not “boo.” I have ordered recordings to be made and analyzed. It is just like those dumb walking milkbags to turn on one the moment adversity strikes! They bear watching!!
JANUARY 11, 1945
Treacheries afoot! I caught the entire herd red-handed today, all facing in the same direction, toward the west and the advancing Allied forces! Bormann failed to prove to my satisfaction that they were not British cattle parachuted in. I left him with orders to monitor the movements of Irmtraud, the walleyed Holstein—or her double!
FEBRUARY 2, 1945
I have today ordered Lactia to be converted immediately into a practice rink for the new roller-skating regiments that will soon reverse events—if Speer can get enough ball bearings!!!
MARCH 12, 1945
Up all night designing a new kind of cow. Upon it depends the future!
APRIL 27, 1945
Midget cows on rocket-powered roller skates! Firing concentrated lactic acids! Penetrating tank armor from a range of ten thousand metres!
HOW TO TAKE YOUR PLEASURE SADLY
George Mikes
George Mikes (1912–1987) was born in Siklós, Hungary. He studied law at Budapest University, then became a journalist and was sent to London as a correspondent to cover the Munich crisis. He came for a fortnight but stayed on and made England his home. During the Second World War, he broadcast for the BBC Hungarian Service where he remained until 1951. In 1946 he published How to be an Alien, which identified him as a humourist, though he hadn’t intended the book to be funny. It sold more than 450,000 copies and led to three more books – How to be Inimitable, How to be Decadent and How to be a Brit.
I do not know how the silly phrase ‘the English take their pleasures sadly’ originated. Slavs take their pleasures sadly. A Russian cannot really enjoy himself without sobbing for an hour or two on another Slavonic bosom. But Englishmen? They, in their moments of pleasure, may be unemotional, shy, phlegmatic – but sad? Oh no, not sad.
The English, instead of taking their pleasures sadly, endure them bravely, in a spirit worthy of their Puritan ancestors. I often imagine a modern Grand Inquisitor summoning an Englishman and sending him on a normal summer holiday. He pronounces sentence:
‘One: tomorrow morning you will get into your car and take twelve and a half hours to cover a four-hour journey. The journey back will take you fifteen hours and the fumes will nearly choke you.
‘Two: when you reach your destination, you will queue up twelve times a day: three times for ice-cream, twice for deck-chairs, three times for beer, once for tea, twice for swings for the children and once just for the hell of it.
‘Three: whenever you feel unbearably hot, I order you to accept the additional torture of drinking hot tea.
‘Four: when it gets still hotter, you will drive down to the seaside and sit in the oven of your car, for two hours and a half.
‘Five: wherever you go, there will never be less than two thousand people around you. They will shout and shriek into your ear and trample on your feet and your only consolation will be that you, too, trample on their feet. There is no escape from them. You may try the countryside but the countryside, too, will be transformed into an ever-lasting Bank Holiday fairground, strewn with paper bags and empty tins and bottles. Furthermore, to add to your sufferings, I order you to take a portable radio everywhere with you and listen to “Housewives’ Choice” and “Mrs Dale’s Diary” incessantly!’
If all this were meted out as dire punishment, proud, free Englishmen everywhere would rise against it as they have always risen against foul oppression. But as, on top of it all, they have to spend a whole year’s savings on these pleasures, they are delighted if they can join the devotees anywhere.
Britain has been the marvel-country of the world for a long time. Many people used to regard her as decadent, decaying and exhausted until they learned better. How has Britain come out of her many trials, not only victorious but rejuvenated? The secret of the British is very simple: if they can endure their summer holidays, they can endure anything.
HOW TO DIE
George Mikes
George Mikes (1912–1987) was born in Siklós, Hungary. He studied law at Budapest University, then became a journalist and was sent to London as a correspondent to cover the Munich crisis. He came for a fortnight but stayed on and made England his home. During the Second World War, he broadcast for the BBC Hungarian Service where he remained until 1951. In 1946 he published How to be an Alien, which identified him as a humourist, though he hadn’t intended the book to be funny. It sold more than 450,000 copies and led to three more books – How to be Inimitable, How to be Decadent and How to be a Brit.
The English are the only race in the world who enjoy dying. Most other peoples contemplate death with abject and rather contemptible fear; the English look forward to it with gusto.
They speak of death as if it were something natural. It is, of course, more natural than birth. Hundreds of millions of people are not born; but all who are born, die. During the bombing raids of the last war people on the Continent prayed: ‘God, even if I have to be hit and maimed, please spare my life.’ The English said: ‘If I have to die, well, I couldn’t care less. But I don’t want to be made an invalid and I don’t want to suffer.’ Foreign insurance agents speak of ‘certain possibilities’ and the ‘eventuality’ that ‘something might happen to you’; the English make careful calculations and the thought that the insurance company will have to pay up always sweetens their last hours. Nowhere in the world do people make so many cruel jokes about the aged and the weak as here. In continental families you simply do not refer to the fact that a parent or a grandparent is not immortal. But not long ago my two children burst into my room and asked me:
‘Daddy, which of us will get your camera when you die?’
‘I’ll let you know,’ I replied. ‘By the way, I am sorry to be still alive. It’s not my fault. I can’t help it.’
They were a little hurt.
‘Don’t be silly. We don’t really mind at all. We only wanted to know who’ll get the camera.’
And when the moment comes, the English make no fuss. Dead or alive, they hate being conspicuous or saying anything unconventional. They are not a great people for famous last words.
I shall never forget the poor gentleman who once travelled with me on the Channel boat. Only the two of us were on deck as a viol
ent storm was raging. A tremendous gale was lashing mountainous seas. We huddled there for a while, without saying anything. Suddenly a fearful gust blew him overboard. His head emerged just once from the water below me. He looked at me calmly and remarked somewhat casually:
‘Rather windy, isn’t it?’
FOILED BY PRESIDENT FRED
Spike Milligan
Terence Alan ‘Spike’ Milligan (1918–2002) was born in India, where his father was a soldier, and came to England in 1934. Early jobs ranged from factory hand to scrubber in a laundry; he was also a trumpet player in a band for a while, then a trumpet player not in a band. He met Harry Secombe in the army, teamed up for concerts, began to write, met Peter Sellers – and so began The Goon Show from which the text below is taken. He appeared in many films and West End plays. His other writings include the novel Puckoon, various books of children’s and comic verse, and the bestselling Adolf Hitler – My Part in His Downfall.
